Fun game: see how many clicks it takes you to learn what MLIR stands for.
I lost count at five or six. Define your acronyms on first use, people.
I lost count at five or six. Define your acronyms on first use, people.
Stop carrying water for poor documentation practice.
However, MLIR is a highly-specialized term. The problem with failing to define a term like that is that I don't know up front if I'm the target audience for the article. I had to Google it, and when I did that, all I found at first were yet more articles that failed to define it.
Wikipedia gets the job done, but these days, Wikipedia is often a long way down the Google search results list. I think they downranked it when they started force-feeding AI answers (which also didn't help).
Just say to the AI, "Explain THIS".
Just say to the AI, "Explain THIS".
Also HN: "Not like that"
Get better at computers and stop needing to be spoon-fed information, people!
When confusion gets framed as "this is substandard writing", it rewards showing up and performing a lack of context rather than engaging with the substance or asking clarifying questions. Over time that creates pressure to write to the lowest common denominator, instead of the audience the author is clearly aiming at.
HN already operates on an implicit baseline (CUDA, open source, LLVM, etc.) and mostly lets comments fill in gaps. That usually produces better discussions than treating every unfamiliar term as an author failure, especially when someone is just trying to share or explain something they care about.
So yeah, I am genuinely curious why you see personal unfamiliarity as something the entire discussion should reorganize itself around.
(Shrug) The fact is that all major style guides -- APA, MLA, AP, Chicago, probably some others -- call for potentially-unfamiliar acronyms to be defined on first use, and it's common enough to do so. For some reason, though, essentially nobody who writes about this particular topic agrees with that.
Which is cool -- it's not my field, so I don't really GAF. I'm mostly just remarking on how unusually difficult it was to drill down on this particular term. I'll avoid derailing the topic further than I already have.
Telling people who want to have that participation and discussion to “RTFM” is not a good response.
Often you’ll come across the authors on these posts that can shed direct, 1st person evidence, of what we’re talking about.
So please, when someone asks “what is that?” Don’t respond with “RTFM”.
HN already assumes a baseline of technical literacy. When something falls outside that baseline, the usual move is to ask for context or links, not to reframe personal unfamiliarity as an author failure.
So please, don’t normalize treating "I don’t know this yet" as a failure of the post.
If that is your answer, please just don’t comment.
I won't argue, but there is a middle ground between articles consisting of pure JAFAs and this:
> accommodate readers who won’t even type four letters into a search bar
I think it helps if acronyms are expanded at least once or in a footnote so that the potential new reader can follow along and does not need to guess what ACMV^ means.
^: Awesome Combobulating Method by VTimofeenko, patent pending.
How close was I?